A Woman Doctor (Part Four)

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Bill Ross of the ‘Action Desk — Sheffield’ Team on behalf of Doctor Ivy Oates, and has been added to the site with the author’s permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
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I had to return to Calcutta by train, and to understand the next part, we have to step aside. Two ladies, a doctor and a matron in one of the hospitals, decided that when they had some leave, they would go to Kashmir. Kashmir is a beautiful Shangri-la in the Himalayas — all mountains and lakes. The only unfortunate thing is that men were killing each other then and still are. However, they went to the station. Indian trains were very beautiful; they were sleepers, four berth compartments, but at the end of every carriage, was a two-berth compartment reserved for ladies. So the two ladies got into this compartment, settled down for the night, going across India to Kashmir for their dream holiday. The next morning, they were both found murdered, strangled with a silken scarf. This upset the establishment very much. An Indian Army order came out that women were not to travel in these two-berth compartments any more. They were to travel in four berth compartments.

My husband and I went to Bombay Station and found a four-berth compartment. An Indian lady got in; when the whistle went for the train to start, my husband pulled out his revolver, he handed it to me and said, “It is loaded. If you have to, USE IT!” So I just said, “OK,” and I took the revolver. He hopped off the train and away he went.

At about seven o’clock - it gets dark in the tropics - the train stopped at a station, and the sergeant in charge of the train came down, banging on the door. “LOCK ALL YOUR DOORS! LOCK ALL YOUR DOORS!” So, when the train started up, we went to lock the door, but the lock was broken, we couldn’t lock it. However, we decided to put our tin trunks across the doorway; we had to use tin because the ants had everything else; and away we went. We hoped that if anybody tried to get in, they might fall over them and perhaps, happily break their necks.

Anyway, we settled down for the night. I remember the Indian lady brought some very nice cake with her, with cherries in and cream. We didn’t very often get cream cakes there. However, away we go, I could not lie down because of the bandage around my head, so, when it got dark, I propped myself up in a semi-sitting position on the bunk, and I must have dozed off as we as we ‘sailed’ through the night. Then, I noticed an odd feeling. It seemed cool. I opened my eye, one eye because the other had quietly closed under the bandage, and there, in the darkness of the tiny little light that there was in the carriage, I could see the carriage door was wide open, and standing at the bottom of my bunk, was an Indian figure shrouded in a shawl.

I thought of my revolver and I could not move. I wondered about this, I do not know why, but I could not get that revolver, but when the figure turned towards me, I realised it was the woman from the opposite bunk. If she hadn’t been sharing with the slowest person ‘on the draw’ in the whole sub-continent, she might have had a bad accident. I don’t know how it is that men can draw and shoot in a split second, because I don’t think a woman can, because you’re undecided, you’re not quite sure. Anyway, I don’t know what happened, but I didn’t shoot her and we moved our trunks back against the door, we closed the door, and we got back to Calcutta.

Whenever I’m in a life and death situation, people think it’s hilarious, the men in the mess thought it was terribly funny; maybe it was. Something similar happened to me once in Sheffield. My son was with me, he’d gone out early in the morning, and I heard the door go, then I heard someone rattle the knob. Of course, I didn’t go down, I was in the bathroom; someone came up the stairs. I looked through the door to say, “What have you forgotten?” and found a perfectly strange man coming up the stairs. I said, “GET OUT!” He ran down the stairs. He said, “I’ve come to see if you want anything doing.” I said, “YOU DIDN’T! GET OUT!” When I told my lads, they thought it was hilarious. They said, “I bet he was frightened to death.”

So there you are; however, I got back to Calcutta. I had different jobs. One particular job I had was to go to a place called Bhuracrutee, where a Raja had lent us a beautiful marble guest palace, as a sort of convalescent halfway house in a hospital. We had got a building, which we could have used; it belonged to the army, but they’d never been able to get it sorted out. So, one day, I had to go Bhuracrutee, see to the patients there, stay overnight and come back the next day.

It was the time of the ‘Quit India Campaign’, and this palace was away from any western settlement. Rioting started, so it wasn’t safe for anyone to leave the palace or the hospital to go out. The nurses who had been on all night, had to stay on the next day, and the next night and the next day. So did I. My husband rang me up from the fort in Calcutta where he worked. He said, “Are you all right?” I said, “Of course not, I thought I was only coming for 24 hours. I’ve only got two changes of clothes.” You have to change your clothes at least twice a day in Calcutta. I said, “I’ve no clothes.” So he said, “I will put myself on a convoy, and come and bring you some.” So the home sister who was also incarcerated with me said, “I have a friend in transport and he said ‘I have enough transport to move this hospital to the place in Calcutta, but I haven’t enough men.’” So when my husband arrived, I said, “The home sister has a friend in Home Transport who could move the hospital into Calcutta, but they haven’t enough men.” He said, “How many men do you want? Eighty? A hundred?” I said, “A hundred will do.”

So, he bought lorry loads of men in and transport brought their three tonners; we packed patients, beds, equipment, everything into the three tonners, went in convoy to Calcutta to the building which the army had there, and ‘shovelled’ them all in. I didn’t tell the C.O., after all, the administrators don’t need to know everything, but I did say to the quartermaster, “I’ve a hundred chairs for you Q.” He said, “What do I want with a hundred chairs? I don’t want a hundred chairs.” I said, “Nor do I, but you’re the Quartermaster.”

The next morning, the C.O. sent for me and started apologising, told me how sorry he was that I was out in the sticks; it wasn’t suitable being out there, you know, a poor defenceless woman amongst the rioting etc. And so, when he’d finished, I said, “I’ve moved it.” He said, “Moved WHAT?” I said, “The hospital.” He flew up into the air. He said, “You’ll have offended the Raja.” It was as though I’d started another Indian mutiny. Well, perhaps……….I don’t know. It didn’t occur to me until years afterwards that maybe I had offended the Raja, not only because I had moved the people from his palace without saying goodbye, but “you had done it, a woman”.

It just occurred to me, years later, that that would have offended him. Never mind, whatever happened, happened. The silence after it was deafening. I didn’t get a medal for doing what the C.O. said was impossible, and I didn’t get court-martialled for offending the Raja, but I did hear one of the men saying, “Only a woman would have gotten away with it.”

I don’t know whether you have ever been on a job where you have to cover. But when you are on duty and covering, something always happens. When other people are on, nothing happens; they go to bed. Something always seemed to happen when I was orderly officer. One early hour of the morning, the war in Burma had ceased and men were coming back to Calcutta, to go home. Lorry loads of men were being taken to Calcutta Station, and they had a pile up; one lorry ran into another, and the Casualty was full of badly injured men and slightly injured men. The whole lorry load suddenly arrived in Calhitti. And of course, who is orderly officer? I am. Well, I don’t mind a big job like that, it suits me. I like a big organising job. “All those not hurt, go over there, a char will make you some tea. All those with slight cuts and bruise, over there, the nurses will see to you.

We had runners, we didn’t have telephones. So we sent all the boys, the runners off to every ward to get them to send all the orderlies with all the stretchers they’d got, and they all came running into Casualty like spokes on a wheel. We put the more seriously ill ones on the stretchers to get them onto the wards. And then I thought, “What am I doing? We have a Casualty like Piccadilly Circus, and all the men are in bed. So then I sent all the runners to get all the consultants up, and I can just imagine what they said. It gave me great pleasure.

However, that was one night. Another night I was on, the troops had come out of Burma and they were bright yellow with nepacrine, and they thought, “Hooray, we’re out of Malaria country.” They stopped taking nepacrine. A Medical Officer rings me up and says, “I’ve ten men with Malaria.” He rings again, “I’ve eight more men with Malaria.” He was gradually shipping the whole regiment to me with malaria, because they’d all stopped taking the nepacrine, and that was his blessed fault. However, I said, “Look, I’ve no more beds left. You’ll have to turn one of your barrack rooms into a ward, and I’ll send you the treatment. We can’t admit anyone else. That was another time when the C.O. went out, and went to bed with a half empty hospital and woke up to find it bulging at the seams. They must have dreaded me being on.

Once, I got a phone call from French Indo-China. A little French girl, they thought, had inhaled a peanut and we were the only people who could do the bronchoscopy. So they said, could they fly her over? So I said, “Yes!” The next morning, the C.O.’s having kittens. “YOU HAVE ADMITTED A CIVILIAN TO A MILITARY HOSPITAL. YOU MAY HAVE TO PAY FOR HER!” So I said, “Alright, I will.” I didn’t know what I was going to pay, but he wasn’t going to brow beat me. I said, “I thought the French were our allies.” Mind you, we had our doubts about that. I was never forgiving of the French for letting us sink their navy, rather than come over to the allies when Hitler invaded France. However, we got the little girl and I think the C.O. was a bit touched, seeing me going round with this little girl, talking to her in my pigeon French.

Anyway, we did the bronchoscopy and she hadn’t got a peanut stuck there, and she was flown back and I didn’t hear any more about it. But this is how it was.

Now, V.E. Day, the war in Europe had finished. We were glad to hear of course, that it had finished, but our war hadn’t. We were still fighting the Japs. They were the rottenest enemy anybody could fight. All the atrocities that were done by the Germans were done by the Japs. People had hidden many of the things that the Japs did. The Germans have had to live with their past, but not the Japs. However, it took an atomic bomb to end our war. Now, when the atomic bomb fell, people had said to me that it was immoral. But I don’t see it as any worse to be killed by an atomic bomb than by torture, and the treatment that the Japs dealt out to our prisoners. They say, “Was it necessary to drop two bombs?” Well, the Japs were a people very difficult to vanquish because of their ideology. Whether one would have been enough, I do not know, but, they had a documentary on television: when Hitler was losing the war, he sent a submarine with his uranium, and all the details of how far the Germans had got with an atomic bomb. We knew the submarine was going to Japan, and we did not want to sink it. We wanted to capture it, which we did. With that, we realised how near the Japs were to an atomic bomb and how near the Germans were. So it wasn’t a matter of whether it was right to drop it, it was a question of who was first to drop it. That justified to me the second atomic bomb.

Parts 1 - 5 of this story can be found at:

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